Aubergine

The things I say (blogathon theme day)

The 2012 Blogathon theme day today is Wordle.  Here is the Wordle for this blog.  I'm surprised at the relative size of words like "really" and "get."  A good reminder to do more pre-publish editing to tighten up my writing!

I Bloom*d

I wrote last week about focusing on more self care and trying an app on my phone called Bloom.  I've been using it for a few days now and wanted to let you know how it was going.

I really wanted to like this app. I could probably stop the review right there.  Because I wanted to, and it just isn't quite what I want.  It is a fantastic idea.  I love the concept.  But the implementation is just not that great.  The graphics are great, but after a week my impression is that the app is a big and clunky, if pretty, poorly executed good idea.  

Basically the app allows you to set up Blooms (reminders) to do various things in different categories, like Health, Lifestyle, and Career.  You can include several photos, which play in a slideshow, and identify an audio track to play along with it.  

First I set up a custom Bloom.  It takes four different screens to enter the Bloom text, choose photos, choose music, and then save. You can add photos to a custom Bloom in one of several ways - from your photo library, from the camera directly, or from one of three online Galleries, including a Community Gallery.  I tried the Community Gallery, which includes some really nice photos and some random snapshots which made me wonder if users know their photos are being saved to a shared gallery. The picker for the Community Gallery offers a filter but as far as I can tell it is just re-ordering the photos, not actually filtering any out.  

You can also choose to download free Blooms from the Bloom Store, which are preloaded with inpiration text, photos, and music.  These are beautiful, and much much easier than making your own, but there aren't that many to choose from and they may not match your desired actions or goals. 

I set up several Blooms and waited a day - nothing happened. That's when I discovered that reminders are off by default, which makes no sense to me whatsoever. Isn't the point to be reminded to do something? You access the reminders settings in each Bloom individually. You can select which days of the week and what time you want to be reminded, or which days with a random time.  But the reminder options do not have enough flexibility.  I know more flexibility is possible because the options in Calendar are awesome.  But if, for example, I wanted to set up a Bloom reminding me to drink a glass of water once in the morning and once in the afternoon - can't do that.  Or a Bloom reminding me to do a set of sun salutations at one time every weekday morning and a different time on the weekend days - can't do that either. You also can't do bi-weekly or every third day, or anything fancy like that.  

I was pretty frustrated with the implementation by this point, but I was still intrigued with the idea. I let it run the rest of the week to see how it went.  I now get reminders that encourage me to drink a glass of water, call a friend, step outside and get a lungful of fresh air, notice something beautiful, etc.  The app is just sending notification badges to my phone, so the whole slideshow and music aspect are lost on me.  I haven't launched the app again since I set it up. All I really want are the badges that interrupt me and remind me to do something good for myself.  So in that respect, the app is doing exactly what I want it to do. It was painful to set up, but I got the result I wanted.

I've noticed a little resistence on my part to always to do the things (even though I picked them!), but I'm getting better. If nothing else, I've upped my water intake and taken quite a few more deep breaths in the last few days than I had for a while.

In the end, I have mixed feelings about the app.  I hope that future updates simplify the user interface and flexibility of options.  I didn't set up a Life Tree on the MindBloom.com site to link up that functionality, so I realize I'm missing a bit of the intended useage.  But it is doing what I wanted - encouraging me to stop for a moment and do something good for myself - so I'm going to keep using it for a while.

Have you used Bloom?  What do you think?  Are there other iPhone apps out there that would meet my needs that are a little simpler?

 

Productivity tool: Workflowy

I found a great new tool recently called Workflowy.  It is so simple it is brilliant.  It runs in a browser, so it works the same across all of my iDevices (love that!).  And best?  it is free!

The biggest issue I struggle with when trying to get things done is that I have too many things in my brain.  My poor noggin is working so hard on remembering all of my to do items and great ideas that I have trouble concentrating on the one thing that I'm working on.  This tool lets me just clear my head so I can focus.  I also love that I can strike items out that are completed, because what's the point of a list if I can't mark DONE all over it?

I have long used an application called Things on my Mac and iPhone, and Workflowy won't replace that.  But before I can set due dates and sort things neatly into projects and prioritize my working order I have to get all that stuff out of my head.  That's where Workflowy comes in.  I can just type into it like an outline. When I have more details on a project or a task I can just tab over and drill down into it.  I can even change the view so I'm just looking at one task and its details at a time, or I can view the whole flowing mess (I admit that can be a little overwhelming).  One could easily just use Workflowy to keep track of tasks, but once I've done the brain download, I find it helpful to move tasks with deadlines over to Things, where I can set reminders on them.  

I've only been using Workflowy for a bit over a week, so there's a lot I haven't tried yet, but so far I'm super impressed. I suspect it will be really useful for working out rough outlines on writing projects.  I've been trying to shove those into Things but a formal to-do list application really is not the right place for those.  

Here are a few "Pro User" tips from the Workflowy team that I found really helpful: 

Completing items. Every item can be a task if you want it to be. Once you've completed a task, hover over the bullet point of the corresponding item and click "Complete" in the menu that pops up. This will strike out the item.  Your lists can become cluttered with completed items quickly, so we recommend you hide them by clicking on the "Completed: Visible" button in the upper right of the page. There's also nothing sweeter than completing tasks and seeing them disappear before your eyes.

Search. WorkFlowy lets you navigate through your lists by expanding them and zooming. But sometimes you forget where you put something. Or maybe you want to bring up all the items that contain a specific word. The search feature lets you filter your WorkFlowy account (or whatever list you're currently zoomed to) instantly, as you type. Try it by using the search box at the top of the page.

Sharing and collaboration. You can share or collaborate on any sublist in your WorkFlowy account. This is a powerful feature that lets you turn any portion of your notes, tasks, lists, etc., into a page that others can view or edit. They'll see your updates (and you'll see theirs) in near-realtime. Click "Share" in the menu that pops up when you hover over a bullet point. Read our blog post on this feature for more info.

Tagging. Sometimes you want to associate together items that are in different parts of your WorkFlowy tree. Say you have tasks for a trip you're planning in one area and tasks for a project you're working on in another. You want to mark tasks in both areas as being "high priority," and then you want to view only the high priority tasks.  Tags let you do this. Add the tag "#highpriority" to all your high-priority tasks. Then click the tag (once you've stopped editing the item) to filter only items with that tag. Click the tag again to turn off filtering.

If you've used this tool and have any other tips I'd love to hear them!

something strange is afoot

I recently discovered that two posts to this blog had just disappeared.  Because once one has been trained as a software tester, one is always a software tester, I had to understand why.  I believe it is because I wrote  later posts in the same editing window as the missing entries, and when I published the later entry the earlier ones were written over.  There's probably a post ID associated with the window, and it has to be reloaded to get a new ID.  This isn't obvious in the UI, but I'll be more careful now.  And file a bug with typepad!  I've reposted the two entries, and backdated them:   1002 ways to reward employees and live .